The previous lectures on Hitler and the haphazard development of the
concentration camps raised the question of the origins and causes of the
Nazi genocide. Many scholars argue that Hitler had a clear plan for mass
murder in his mind since the early 1920s, but the many twists and turns
in the haphazard development of the system of mass murder indicate that
this plan emerged gradually. Still, we need to know where the idea of
genocide came from.

This week we turned to the role of "racial science" played
in the emergence of the system of Nazi genocide. Noting that our textbook
does not cover this topic at all, I began with a quotation from Gerald
Markle's Meditations of a Holocaust Traveler (Reader no. 3),
p. 111:

"Most
historians have attempted to account for the horrible excesses of Nazi
science in one of two ways: as perverted by politicians,
or as perverted by scientists. I think that each of
these accounts is at best narrow, at worst deeply flawed. Both lead
us away from a proper understanding of Nazi medicine—as an important
expression of Nazi social structure and culture."

On the EIEIO model, this indicates that two Elites played
a role: political and scientific, as well as the institutionally anchored
structure of German culture. In the films we saw, Existence without
Life (the one with the fictitious lecture at Munich university) showed
a professor arguing that the support of the institutionalized disabled
was a huge burden on Germany's Economy. That prof's unscientific
arguments point to the role of Ideology. Today I'll talk
mostly about the international connections (especially to the eugenics
movement in the US), and the role individual peOple's
Opposition played in forcing the program into an even
more stealthy mode in 1941.

1902: Stanford Univeristy president David Starr Jordan (1851-1931)
published: The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of
Races through Survival of the Unfit (Boston, American Unitarian
Association, 1902, 1906, 1910), 82 pages

1927: Supreme Court affirmed Virginia's law in Buck vs. Bell (Carrie
Buck was sterilized because of sexual promiscuity"--she had
been raped by a relative of her foster parents). In the majority
opinion Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "It is better
for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring
for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can
prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind….
Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
(see the University
of Virginia library's excellent Buck vs. Bell website)

Eugenics soon moved to encompass not only "positive"
selective breeding, but "negative" selective weeding out
of people deemed inferior--termed euthanasia.
Black writes in the Nov. 2003 article cited above:'The grand plan
was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those
deemed weak and inferior--the so-called "unfit." The eugenicists
hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population
at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.
Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary
Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's
Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for
Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population."
Point eight was euthanasia.'

Film Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third
Reich(Discovery
Channel, 1993), 45 mins., based on research by Michael Burleigh, published
in his Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany, 1900-1945
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), esp. chapter 6, pp. 183-219.

Town of Hadamar, north of Frankfurt; "Devereaux"-like institution
there (still there today)

testimony of Elvira Mathey, who was rescued by a nurse after undressing

discussion of Paul Reuter, who formerly worked at Hadamar, with
the son of someone who was killed there

Features excerpts from 6 Nazi propaganda films (one only footage,
another only script)

1935: What you inherit; Hereditarily
ill(Was Du Erbst, Erbkrank); for
Nazi party members

1937: Victims of Past (Opfer der
Vergangenheit); specially commissioned by Hitler, shown in
the pre-showing in all 3,000 cinemas in Germany

1939, Aug. 18: Ministry of Interior decrees that midwives and doctors
must report the births of children with defects

1939, October: Hitler wrote a letter, back-dated to Sept. 1, to his
personal doctor Karl Brandt and chancellory leader Philipp Bouhler,
commissioning them to give certain doctors the authority to perform
euthanasia: "Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are responsibly
commissioned to expand the authority of certain physicians to be designated
by name in such manner that persons who, according to human judgment,
are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition
of sickness, be accorded a mercy death." [Nuremberg document 2710-NO]

early 1940: killings in institutions began (by Carbon monoxide gas
in cylinders).
Six institutions were used: Grafeneck near Stuttgart, moved in January
1941 to Hadamar near Frankfurt; Brandenburg prison, moved in Nov. 1940
to Bernburg an the Saale; Hartheim near Linz; Sonnenstein near Pirna.

Soon became an open
secret in neighboring towns (black buses)

obviously fake death certificates: death by appendicitis after appendix
removed

On the question of what role "racial science" and "euthanasia"
played in the Holocaust, see:

Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From
Euthanasia to the Final Solution (North Carolina, 1995)
(searchable
on amazon)

Friedlander makes a strong case that the Nazi "euthanasia"
program played a crucial role, right down to individual personnel
who went from the killing institutions to the extermination
centers

The ethical question of using the results of experiments on human
subjects against their will:
Pernkopf Anatomical Atlas (4 vols., 1943ff; republished in 2 vols.
in 1960s and 1980s). See text beginning with notes 22-23 in William
Seidelman, "On
Science: Medicine and Murder in the Third Reich," Dimensions
13:1(199x).
Use of 1377 corpses between 1938 and 1943